Cyberdrag Out of Touch with Techno and House Music

To the Editors:

I am writing to express my anger and frustration over the selection of deejays for Drag Ball, and specifically the lack of techno and house music. The selections made and the process of selection indicate a lack of respect for electronic music and the Oberlin Turntablist Society.

Over my past four years at Oberlin, a number of my associates and I have worked long and hard to promote electronic dance music by deejaying at parties, many of them thrown and paid for by us. Last year we formed the Oberlin Turntablist Society in order to better organize and promote ourselves, and this semester our charter was finally approved, making us an official student organization.

What's so special about the OTS, you may ask? The OTS includes community members, helping to foster a friendship between the town and the College based on music. Members of the OTS have gone on to establish themselves in other locations, including New York and San Francisco. Others come to the organization as already established producers and deejays. Nearly all OTS members have deejayed professionally, and a majority of members have been involved in the TIMARA department during their Oberlin careers. Recently three hip hop deejays have joined the OTS, giving it a more diverse and comprehensive flavor.

Given these accomplishments, one would think that the OTS would garner a fair amount of respect on the Oberlin campus. Unfortunately, this does not hold true for the 'Sco and its staff, who have been given the responsibility of selecting deejays for Drag Ball. The 'Sco has long had a bias against electronic music, giving many OTS deejays only one night a semester and usually an undesirable night at that. I could count on one hand the number of quarter beers that have featured electronic music in the past four years.

The 'Sco may argue that electronic music simply doesn't have the draw that hip hop and Latin music currently do. That is fair, but Drag Ball will feature four rooms of music, certainly enough to allow electronic music some representation. Anyone who attended one of the YAP parties last year above Gibson's, one of our parties underneath Mudd ramp this year or any of the many other parties we play at knows that people will come out and dance to techno. Even other members of Wilder staff seem to be interested in the further promotion of electronic dance music on this campus. Unfortunately the 'Sco staff's narrow-minded view of what is popular does not fit in with this vision of a musically diverse campus.

Let me finish with a brief explanation of why the inclusion of electronic music at Drag Ball is important. House music, a form of techno, developed in gay clubs in Chicago in the 1980s. Rising from the ashes of disco, it offered a liberating vision to the normally oppressed and confined gay population. It quickly gained popularity in Europe, where it found an audience that encompassed all types of people, regardless of their constructed characteristics. In the 1990s house music spread not only back to the U.S. but also worldwide, continuing to offer the same message of freedom as it did in the Warehouse in Chicago. Indeed today the predominant style of music in gay clubs continues to be house music. While not all cross dressers are gay, there is a strong historical link between LGBT peoples and cross dressers. Similarly, while Drag Ball is not an event specifically linked to sexuality, it is a liberating representation of the ideals that Oberlin likes to tout (even if it has problems expressing them in real life).

Please give the OTS and house music the respect they deserve at Drag Ball. I guarantee we'll have 'em dancing all night long.

--Gardner Swan, President, OTS, and College Senior,

Offensive Ban Mocks Students

To the Editors:

Last Monday we attended a Concert Board show headlined by a band called Arab on Radar. This racist name should have been enough forewarning of the band's offensive message.

The Review article promoting the show put forth an additional exclusivity. In this article, Oberlin students were challenged to be tough enough to handle the band's "aural assault," and it was stated: "the concert will be telling of who dresses the part and who lives it." The article ends with a note to women ("Indie Rock Girls") that the opening bands consist of "some of the cutest boys on campus." Whether or not it was intended, the implication here is that all women attending the concert would be straight and would be there only to check out the "cute boys" onstage.

But we, and probably most people there, were not prepared for what the singer of Arab on Radar said in between their second and third songs. "We hear there's a lot of uptight fuckin' bitches around here," he spouted. "You know what we do with uptight bitches. We un-tighten them. We loosen them."

We were shocked by the violence of these words. After a moment of paralysis, we walked out, passing in front of the stage. Many people stayed inside. As we shared our anger at what had happened, we could see people inside continuing to dance to the music. We later found out that as we were leaving, the band stuck up their middle fingers at us and made obscene gestures with their tongues. Obviously, we were just "uptight bitches," not "hard" enough to stick around as they used the authority of the stage to advocate rape.

After hearing these words, we had to reinterpret Arab on Radar's entire performance style - aggressive wielding of their instruments and trying to intimidate audience members - as part of the band's advocation of violence and hate.

Arab on Radar did not stop at threatening women: they later performed a song with homophobic lyrics and gestures and also mocked racism. And yet some defended their lyrics as secondary to the music, as part of an "aesthetic."

A web site by one of the members of the band includes written entries where he sets forth his philosophy. Jeff Schneider urges his fans to let themselves go: "No laws, no inhibitions about anything...let the essence of your soul come forth and do whatever comes natural." If racism, sexism and homophobia are what "come natural" to Schneider and other members of the band, then we should demand that they keep their inhibitions up. Schneider may think he is challenging fans to break conventional boundaries, but he is merely recycling sexist history. Women who have fought against the abuse and objectification of their bodies have historically been labeled "uptight." This characterization has been used as a tool to silence their protest. At the same time, men have been encouraged to identify with aggressive behavior. These same pressures were at work in the show, and made it difficult for both men and women in the audience to leave in protest, even if they were appalled by what was said.

This kind of show has serious implications for the music scene on campus. First, with four bands and not a single woman performer, whose musical efforts are being encouraged? Women are not just adoring spectators; they are also creating music on campus. In a show where the fans have to prove they are "tough," are women considered "too soft" to contribute anything of worth?

Second, we need to draw a line between provocative, energetic performance and offensive content with connotations of real violence. We cannot allow sexism, homophobia and racism to be accepted as parts of a "cool" musical aesthetic.

--Sonia Brenner, College senior

--Gillian Russom, College senior

--Katherine Growdon, College senior

--Jacob Ciocci, College senior

--Lauren Cornell, College senior

--Sarah Rubinstein, College first-year

Oberlin Fashions Diverse Alumni

To the Editors:

Some of the most satisfying work I've done in my career as a photographer has come while documenting archaeological excavations in Italy and Israel. In the summer of 1995, for instance, I photographed the remains of four public buildings around the civil forum at Pompeii.

The secret to getting the job done, I knew, lay not in starting with the first building, completing it and proceeding to the second. Instead, my method was to move from point to point around all four buildings, following the movement of the sun. The light changed every quarter of an hour, briefly raking down this wall to reveal its texture or illuminating that pavement. I shifted my wooden view camera and case of film holders constantly for two weeks, early morning to late afternoon, as the sun dictated.

Often I would repeat a shot at a different time of day just to get a different sense of the subject. The same wall from the same vantage point yielded different photographs when taken in direct sunlight or in shade. The principal held when photographing small artifacts in museums. First, I aimed a lamp at the object from one direction, took the picture and then moved the light to illuminate the piece from another direction. The piece remained the same but something new was revealed about it when seen in different light. The combination of images adds up to more information that neither shot alone conveys.

In a larger sense, that's what I still carry with me from my four years at Oberlin more than 30 years ago. I tried then as best I could to equip my mind with the alternative sources of light to help look at the world for the rest of my life.

Although I was a history major, I realize now that courses in biological evolution and anthropology added depth to my consciousness of how the world came to be and what it meant. I came to believe that all the disciplines - whether science, arts or humanities - looked at the same world, but saw it in different lights.

I'm thankful for these differences and for the chance to cross those artificial boundaries. For me, there are no "Two Cultures," dividing science and the rest of the world, as British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow put it.

Einstein played the violin, and not badly. A poet can still appreciate a physicist's view of the universe. A molecular biologist can be captivated by a great painting or a concerto. My brother, a sculptor who works in glass, takes careful notes on each batch of glass he melts, much like a chemist running an experiment. Exploration of the human heart -whether that involves endothelial cells or the novelist's dissection of love - adds complexity and texture to our view of the world.

One of the great values of an Oberlin education is the opportunity to take advantage of that great spectrum and to shine light on the world before us from many directions. Those lights illuminate our path for the rest of our lives.

--Aaron Levin, OC '68, Baltimore, MD, Chairman, Communications Committee, Oberlin College Alumni Association